The Tuberculin Skin Test Is Unreliable in School Children BCG-vaccinated in Infancy and at Low Risk of Tuberculosis Infection
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The tuberculin skin test (TST) is often used to screen for latent tuberculosis infection (LTBI) in school children, many of whom were bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG)-vaccinated in infancy. The reliability of the TST in such children is unknown. METHODS: TSTs performed in low-risk BCG-vaccinated and -nonvaccinated grade 1 and grade 6 First Nations (North American Indian) school children in the province of Alberta, Canada, were evaluated retrospectively. To further assess the specificity of the TST, BCG-vaccinated children with a positive TST (≥10 mm of induration) and no treatment of LTBI were administered a QuantiFERON-TB Gold In-Tube test (QFT-GIT, Cellestis International). RESULTS: A total of 3996 children, 2063 (51.6%) BCG-vaccinated and 1933 (48.4%) BCG-nonvaccinated, were screened for LTBI. Vaccinated children were more likely than nonvaccinated children to be TST positive (5.7% vs. 0.2%, P < 0.001). Vaccinated children with a positive TST were more likely to have a recent past TST as compared with those with a negative TST (6.8% versus 2.8%, P = 0.01). Among 65 BCG-vaccinated TST-positive children who underwent a QFT-GIT, only 5 (7.7%; 95% CI: 2.5%, 17.0%) were QFT-GIT positive. A TST of ≥15 mm was more likely to be associated with a positive QFT-GIT than a TST of 10 to 14 mm, 16.0% (95% CI: 4.5%, 36.1%) versus 2.5% (95% CI: 0.1%, 13.2%), P = 0.047. CONCLUSION: The TST is unreliable in school children, BCG-vaccinated in infancy, and who are at low risk of infection. The QFT-GIT is a useful confirmatory test for LTBI in BCG-vaccinated TST-positive school children.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".